Tame That Magic Mouse With Either of Two Utilities

It didn’t take long after I picked up a Magic Mouse for use with my MacBook before great suggestions started pouring in pointing to utilities that make the mouse even more useful. I have spent some time playing with a couple of them, and it does seem like you can take the multitouch capabilities of the Magic Mouse to new levels with either.

The first app I tested was BetterTouchTool, and I found it to be a very powerful tool. It allows total configuration of the Magic Mouse, including swipes, clicks and gestures. There are so many settings I admit it’s a bit daunting to explore, and will require some extended testing to find what works best. This tool also provides configuration over the MacBook trackpad, which some may find useful.

The second tool I tried seems to be a better fit for me. MagicPrefs is written to provide complete control over the Magic Mouse, and makes it possible to configure up to four finger touch events to trigger different things. It can handle taps, clicks, swipes, drags and pinches, which makes for a very personal mouse usage tool.

I would have no qualms using either of these utilities, as they both are very well done. For now I’m sticking with MagicPrefs, as much to try to get it fully customized the way I want it as for any other reason.

While writing this post I had a situation develop that may have had something to do with the mouse utilities. The Magic Mouse lost connection to the MacBook, and nothing could bring it back. Over the course of futzing with that, the MacBook’s trackpad went dead, leaving me with no good way to control things.

I rebooted the MacBook (after saving the draft post), and when it came back up no Bluetooth hardware was detected. I had to do the old Command-Option-P-R trick to get it back. I’m thinking that switching between these two utilities, both of which control the mouse and/or trackpad, that something got confused. It may be that one or both of them don’t cleanly quit when instructed to do so, and perhaps both were fighting over the mouse at the same time.